Race Ethnicity: MENA

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course explores how race and ethnicity constituted difference, governance, and citizenship in the modern Middle East and North Africa. The course therefore begins in 1750 to appreciate the changes and continuity the experience of modernity involves, while ending in 2015 with a snapshot of race and ethnicity in our contemporary moment. We will look at a variety of processes that historians understand to be central to the making of the modern MENA (e.g., the introduction of modern techniques of governance, the spread of market relations, the reconfiguration of social categories, and the emergence of a public sphere), and their 20th-century intensification and territorial encaging through the contemporary state system of the region. We will engage with trans-regional dynamics such as colonialism, nationalism, sectarianism, and mass politics at same time that we attend to specificities such as the Armenian Genocide, the differential trajectories of struggle for Kurdish equality in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and anti-Blackness in each of North Africa and the Levant. How are race and ethnicity productive categories of analysis for making sense of this history? What place did processes of racialization have throughout—not just in the encounter between European/US (read white) imperialism and local (read non-white) regimes/movements, but also within and between the societies and social groups of the region. We will read across the fields of Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Middle East Studies (overlaps notwithstanding) to explore the concepts of race, ethnicity, and their relationship, how and why they should matter to our understanding of the region, and how MENA scholars—past and present—have addressed (or not) questions of race and ethnicity. We will therefore be informed by the work and urgency of anti-racism as a mode of political and intellectual work to analyze both the history and historiography of race and ethnicity in the modern Middle East and North Africa.